January 29, 2004

waproamd, Fedora Core 1, and cloaked access points

Here’s a message I sent to the author (I hope) of waproamd:

        Hi.  I just downloaded and started using waproamd.  Thanks
very much for this software.
                                                                                
        I've made RPM packaging for waproamd and modified its initscript
to work with Red Hat/Fedora (I'm running Fedora Core 1) tools.  I've
put the two patches I had to make against waproamd to allow me to
build the RPM (SYSV_INITDIR vs. SYSINITDIR in some files is probably a
bug; see waproamd-0.5b-initdir.patch) and the modifications to the
init script (waproamd-0.5b-initscript.patch) up at

http://www.codefu.org/people/darkness/waproamd/.

        Also, I have to associate to some cloaked networks.  "iwlist
scan" and waproamd in logs reports these access points as having ESSID
"" (blank) before I manually set the ESSID.  After I set the ESSID
"iwlist scan" sees the cloaked access points twice: once with blank
ESSID and once with the ESSID I just set it to.  My script for such an
access point looks like:

case "$1" in
        start)
                ESSID=TheCloakedSSID ifup wlan0
                ;;
                                                                                
        stop)
                ifdown $IFACE
                ;;
esac
                                                                                
I put this file in /etc/waproamd/scripts/<MAC of AP>.  The interface
comes up successfully, but immediately after the script executed
waproamd seemed to be "unsetting" the ESSID (or setting it to blank).
I surmise this is because of the call to iw_set_essid in
iwapi.c's iw_tune(), which is called immediately after setting up the
AP.  I've made a patch which simply avoids the call to iw_set_essid if
the essid field in the ap_info structure is NULL or blank.  This patch
is at

http://www.codefu.org/people/darkness/waproamd/waproamd-0.5b-cloaked-ap.patch

        I hope this might be helpful to you or other users.  I'll
probably put this message up on the web somewhere as well, unless you
can identify a particularly grievous error I've made.
                                                                                
Thanks again,
darky

All that stuff I mentioned is at http://www.codefu.org/people/darkness/waproamd/ for those of you too slack to type it in.

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